The University of Wisconsin’s Physical Education Teacher Education program coordinator Cindy Kuhrasch launched a new app called enCourage Tuesday that provides educators with a database of social learning activities, according to an article posted by the UW School of Education.
The app sports over 300 different activities that videos, instructions and lists of necessary materials to help educators foster connection and positive social interactions amongst their students, Kuhrasch said.
“I see the app as applicable to anyone who engages in community building through educational means, regardless of their discipline,” Kuhrasch said to the School of Education. “The goal is to provide educators with simple yet high-impact activities that can be used to build social and emotional skills.”
The app makes use of a feature called “Group Challenges” which divides the database up into categories based on participant needs. The feature is segmented into five categories — negativity, aggression, impulsivity, disrespectful, and disruptive, Kuhrasch said.
A teacher looking to work on a student’s impulsivity might select the “impulsivity” tab and choose from an array of activities like “blind pictionary” and “back to back” drawing.
Once selecting a game, the app opens a page detailing the rules of the game, the type of game that it is, the CASEL skills it focuses on, a link to video tutorial, and a list of learning reflection questions.
Kuhsrasch said that the idea of creating an online tool like this had interested her for a while, but it was not until receiving a School of Education Staff Innovation Grant in the spring of 2023 that the project really got underway.
“When this funding became available, I reached out to some friends at academic technology,” Kuhrasch said in an interview with The Badger Herald. “‘I said ‘Hey, would you be interested in helping me take this to the next level and turn it into an app?’ And they have such great expertise and they loved the idea, so it was really pretty easy.”
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Kuhrasch said interest in improving physical education and creating a resource like enCourage UW app long predates COVID-19, but the pandemic has made the kind of social-skill building activities featured in the app all the more important.
Khurasch elaborated that her motivation for creating the app is actually much more complex than than the COVID-19 pandemic.
She explained that in her many years as a physical education teacher, it had always occurred to her that the class can be looked at as a social experiment — where the instructor places groups of people who may not know each other into a gym to practice something they have never done before.
“It could be a really negative experience. It can also be a really powerful experience,” Khurasch said. “If the people in the room all gather around you. It can really be transformational.”
Kuhrasch told the School of Education she hopes her app will reach thousands of people worldwide.
She said the enCourage UW app and the mission of the Physical Teacher Education Program is centered around producing the best physical educators.
“They can use this app and their other skills to develop a really wonderful, warm, inclusive place to be where people can grow not only in their physical skills, but as humans,” Kuhrasch said.
The app is available to download for free on Apple and Google Play stores.
